Strip thesis - part 1
One world gambling, one ante and a sucker. His name is Charles de Gaulle. It could have be Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Jacques Chirac or even Napoleon. Whatever the name, they are French leaders making fly bets on the maps. The game is called Islam.
Long time ago, France was made of Gallic people until the roman culture changed their administration and habits. Civilization has come to Europe with wars and the people may never have known other ways of influence. Kingdom raised winning territories of enslaved people, farmers and craftsmen encompassed into a map of empowered lands and castles. The land itself did not mean anything unless there had people to work the land, make products out of the landscape.
The roman army has won territories and Christianity has spread on roman lands. When Islam was born on the 7th century, it arrived in Spain on 712 and was stopped in France on 733, 163 years after the birth of Mahomet.
The spread of Islam was favored by economical and social disorders among the many countries from Egypt to Spain, and the many copies of codex Parisino-petropolitanus were a mean of socialization, teaching to read, to write and to know over the poor and uneducated people.
In 1455 Gutenberg completed his 42-line Bible, known as the Gutenberg Bible. About 180 copies were printed, most on paper and some on vellum. Wood-block printing of extracts from the Quran is on record as early as the 10th century. Later between 1483 and 1726, printing anything in Arabic was prohibited by the Ottoman empire. The stagnation and decline of the Ottoman Empire was relentless after 1566. In 1699 the Ottoman Empire was, "a mere shadow of that which intimidated East and West alike in 1566." Christian printing had arose.
The transcrip of Professor Freedman teaching: http://oyc.yale.edu/transcript/1244/hist-210
Charlemagne gave birth to the European Empires on December 25th, 800 when the Pope crowned him in Rome. Charlemagne tried to "save something from the wreckage of Classical civilization, and thus, as a Christian ruler and as a Roman Emperor, he surrounded himself with these and other intellectuals monks and scholars. (..) The ideal of" Antique "Roman culture was cultivated leisure on the part of wealthy well-educated lay people. That is to say, the intellectuals of the Empire tended to be not clergy, but wealthy people who could afford the leisure, the time, and the expense of procuring books, and of discussing them. These were the people who represented the continuation of the literary and philosophical traditions of classical Greece and Rome." (Abstracts of Professor Freedman teaching)
"At his monastery of Vivarium in southern Italy, Cassiodorus developed a notion of the liberal arts as an aid to religious truth. The liberal arts is not his invention, but the notion of the liberal arts culminating in a program that has a purpose in which classical culture is fused with Christian culture is his doing. He was not so much interested in the aesthetic pleasure of these classical texts as in their use for interpreting the Bible."
"The Bible, according to his, Augustine's, and virtually everybody's understanding of the time, is not a text that makes perfect sense in every respect literally. It is the book of life that God has set up for us, but it requires interpretation. It is not just a literal text, it is a figurative and prophetic one as well. And in order to get at what it really means, what its real messages are, you have to know things like mathematics, astronomy, geometry, even music, and certainly grammar, rhetoric, and logic. These are the seven liberal arts of Cassiodorus's curriculum."
This belief has fashioned the modern history and is probably one of the most important difference between Christianity and Islam, the belief that to read the book, you had to be educated and the belief that to hear the book, you had to be guided by well-educated people.
The Trivium and Quadrivium were the Liberal Arts. The Trivium is arranged in three basics, the logic, the grammar and the rhetoric. The Quadrivium is arranged in four basics, the arithmetic, the astronomy, the geometry and the music. The quadrivium are the sciences.
"This is encapsulated in one of Charlemagne's governing instructions to his administrative cadres. He says, "we are concerned to restore with diligent zeal the workshops of knowledge, which, through the negligence of our ancestors, have been well-nigh deserted. We invite others by our own example as much as lies within our power to learn to practice the liberal arts."
And this was a modern belief "to restore" and "to invite the others", "by our own example (...) to learn to practice the liberal arts", because it was introducing the knowledge of non religious books to learn and standardize the religious knowledge.
"As Wickham points out, this is an unusual period of intellectuals participating in, and even to some extent, directing government. It's always necessary for governments to have some economists or foreign policy specialists. But intellectuals in the sense of promoting a program of liberal arts is unusual. Or intellectuals who are not just decorators, ornamentors, people who do nice, illuminated manuscripts, or beautiful fountains out of silver with chirping birds. (...) The purpose of this is to standardize education in the Church and to make sure that the Church ran in an effective manner. And also to make sure that the government ran in an effective manner."
The transcript of professor Freedman teaching: http://oyc.yale.edu/transcript/1244/hist-210
Charlemagne's Empire has designed the first millennium of Christianity, the rose of monasteries with the libraries and the active exchange of manuscripts. Carolingian manuscripts where illustrated with enriched illuminated designs. When the Empire of Charlemagne collapsed, the Church remained stronger.
The cathedral of Chartres was built from 1134 to 1260. This is nearly the spent of time from the birth of Islam to its former geographical spread into Spain and France. The edifice of the cathedral has been built on Charlemagne's heritage, with very Ancient knowledge and very modern technologies. The gothic architecture was raising the modern shape of the Christian's church, with its own government and policies.
On the stained glass of the cathedral of Chartres are the names of Ancient kings from North Africa to the Middle East. David, Salomon, Nabuchodonosor, Faraon. Modern historians have an interpretation of the stained glasses telling that Christianity was above all others, while the architects and the designers of the Cathedral may have given a very different interpretation to the representation of the kings. They may have been designed to draw the roots of a modern history, that seperate the knowing from the telling. Subsequently, free-masonry and guilds have grown up with the gothic architecture. Henry the IVth was the only king crowned in the Cathedral of Chartres, maybe an achievement, maybe a decline, in the history of the cathedral.
The tower on the right of the picture shows the ancient times with the Roman architecture. Above the cross at the edge of the tower, there is a moon crescent. On the left side of the picture, the tower shows the modern times and the evolution of the church through the Gothic architecture. At the edge of the tower, there is only the Christian cross. The cathedral of Chartres tells the story of Charlemagne's Empire "to restore" and "to invite the others", "by our own example (...) to learn to practice the liberal arts". The cathedral could have be an accademy, a university or an openned book. It was a school for the people.
The first crusades started on 1096. They were decided by Urbain II, in Clermont Ferrand, France. Israel was governed by the francs from 1099 to 1260. The Templars were created during the council of Troyes, France, on January 13th, 1129 after a militia called The Poor Knights of the Christ and the Temple of Salomon. On 1260, Israel was taken by the Mamelouks. The same year is considered the end of the construction of the cathedral of Chartres.
Following the end of the crusades, Europe had to face the black plague, droughts and social crisis. During the XIVth century, one third of the European population has died from the dark plague, famine and Hundred Years War. In 1453, Constantinople has fallen to the Turkish Ottoman Empire. In 1492, Christopher Colombus discovered America. On February 27th, 1594, Henry the 4th was crowned in the cathedral of Chartres. He was murdered on 1610.
Charlemagne was a king and was made an Emperor by the Christian Church in Rome. He has built his legitimacy on military actions, religious protection and the education of the people. He believed in Liberal Arts, the Trivium and the Quadrivium which have settled the architecture of the Church. But raising a Church name it all. Once the Church has been built, what else does it build ?
The catholic churches and cathedrals were not only educative for the people. They were made also to be eductaive to the priests and the decision leaders. They were built on a very ancient knowledge and they became a language to translate this knowledge into the people's life. But from the knowledge, different communities have grown from the guilds and the freemasonry. While the modern Church has made a public separation with most the secret societies, the roots are in the forest, very deep.
On the "parvis des écholâtres" of the Cathedral of Chartres, we can see five missions of a priest. From left to right, the priest gives the illumination, the faith, the order, he is a father, a guide, a pastor and a ruler. I believe that the representation on the right is the very first representation of the meter later adoped by the French Revolution and Napoleon. Before entering the cathedral, the priest had to walk between the many sculptures. They remind him the missions that was once given by the Emperor Charlemagne and that have remained until the achievement of the Cathedral.
The modern history has inherited from those men and their belief in a mission not to govern, they are nore kings or presidents, not to rule, they do not write the laws, nor even to bring any justice, but to enter the cathedral from this door rather than any other. Some of them are real priests and some others have no more connections with the Church, but they were told that life was walking this way.
France is a very small country with the strong belief in this kind of mission, made "universal" with the freemasonry. The same freemasonry who has made the revolutions and part of America. Seven hundred and fifty years after the construction of the cathedral of Chartres, the world has changed, and the Church has changed. The "strip thesis" will show how the missions have changed too.
